LEONARDTOWN — Earthmoving for the first 179 homes at Stewart’s Grant, the long-planned residential development off Bay Ridge Road in Great Mills, could begin in the middle of summer 2027, the project’s team told the St. Mary’s County Planning Commission on Nov. 9.
Houses will take longer. The St. Mary’s County Metropolitan Commission, the water and sewer utility known as MetCom, has said it will approve the site plan as submitted but will not allow building permits until the Maryland Department of the Environment approves the final design and construction of a sewage pump station, a representative for the project said. The team expects that sign-off in November or December 2027.
The update was a briefing, not a request for approval, and the commission took no vote. The team gave members a two-page status memo and answered questions for about five minutes.
Water tower sized beyond the project
The first phase covers about 179 units, all single-family homes, the representative said. A preliminary engineering report has been completed for a water tower that must be built at the front end to serve that phase, and the tower is being designed 75% larger than Stewart’s Grant alone would need.
The team is also weighing a mass grading permit, which would let crews grade more of the site and lay out roads at one time rather than phase by phase. The representative cited economies of scale and said the developer will have to move quickly from the first phase to the second under its lot schedule with the homebuilder.
“Things are moving along, not as quick as we would like, but they are moving,” the representative said.
Road changes come later
Most of the road improvements tied to the project will not arrive with the first homes. The project’s traffic consultant told the commission that the mitigation approved with the traffic study will be built as part of later phases. That list includes a second lane out of Bay Ridge.
Another required improvement, longer left-turn bays at the intersection of Md. 5 and Md. 246, may be built by the state before the developer gets to it, the consultant said.
Design is being finalized for a traffic circle near the high school that will serve as one of the main entrances to the development, the team said. In response to a commissioner’s question about earlier plans to narrow the road, the consultant said the agreed-upon section was reduced from a multi-lane design to one lane in each direction, with a median and shoulders that double as bike lanes.
How the project got here
Stewart’s Grant is a planned unit development, a zoning tool that sets a custom plan for a large tract. The Commissioners of St. Mary’s County held a public hearing on amendments to that plan on June 24, 2025, and approved the amending ordinance on July 15, 2025, with all five commissioners voting yes, county minutes show. The county listed the action in its summary of that meeting.
The steps described Monday are distinct, and none of them is a building permit. A grading permit allows land to be cleared and shaped. Site plan approval from MetCom covers water and sewer design. Permits to build houses come only after the state acts on the pump station, which under the team’s own estimate puts the earliest home construction at the very end of 2027 or later.
For Great Mills, the timeline means construction traffic could appear on Bay Ridge Road next summer, well before the added lane and other fixes meant to handle the new residents. The size of the water tower suggests the utility is planning for demand beyond this one neighborhood.
The briefing opened a meeting at which the commission also weighed new limits on gas stations and vape shops.
